


pretty girls make graves

by HATECADILLAC



Category: Tomie - All Media Types, 溶解教室 | Youkai Kyoushitsu | Junji Ito's Dissolving Classroom (Manga)
Genre: (i guess), Awkwardness, Chance Meetings, Crossover, Day At The Beach, First Kiss, First Meetings, Gay Male Character, Gen, Gender Issues, Gender Roles, Male-Female Friendship, Minor Violence, Murder, POV First Person, Songfic, Understanding, i think this is the first dissolving classroom fic on here....wig
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23589637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HATECADILLAC/pseuds/HATECADILLAC
Summary: Yuuma has a strange encounter with an even stranger girl he meets at the boardwalk.
Relationships: Kawakami Tomie & Azeri Yuuma
Kudos: 5





	pretty girls make graves

“It’s very easy,” Tomie told me, taking my cold and clammy hand and pretending as though we were walking under the pier together and she was not pulling me, “Like breathing, or falling asleep, and very quick. You’ll like it.” Then we were already sitting on the damp compacted ground, and she was already unbuttoning my shirt and kissing me before I managed to tell her I wasn’t the boy she thought I was—told her with no shortage of apologies, on my knees with my hair in the sand, while she laughed at me.

“I don’t believe you,” Tomie said like she was spitting it, but out of amusement more than anger or genuine dislike; there was something mannish about it, like how a teen boy might spit over the railings at a place like this just to see whose hair or day he could ruin. “All men want me. You’re no exception. Don’t pretend like you don’t want me—give into it.” She tugged on my sleeve in what I’d watched enough TV to know was supposed to be flirtation, and faked her voice the same way, but it just felt pushy and harsh. I had no clue what else to even say, other than just that I wasn’t like a man, that nature had played that kind of trick on me, that I was sorry. Again. Tomie let go of my sleeve, but she still laughed at me, and pity tinged it this time.

Her name was Tomie, and I could not remember how I met her, other than it was today on the boardwalk and already she had seemed to like me more than any other girl I’d ever conned before. She asked me a question I’m too embarrassed to repeat, and like an idiot I answered it truthfully—then she smiled like she already knew and dragged me down here. What was I supposed to do. I had never done this before, had never done anything before, just as she in that brief couple of minutes between then and now had been so fond of repeating. That I had never done anything before, and I was so cute, and how much she liked me. I couldn’t help but listen to her when she said things like that. No one had ever said that to me; clearly, I had never really been a person like Tomie must have been a person. I couldn’t help but listen, even if she was a girl, and so scary because of it.

“Yuuma, don’t you know love?” Tomie asked me, a question to excuse the trailing of her hand down from the stray button she’d yanked open and towards one even more off limits—not that it would have done anything, other than frighten me. “Don’t you know lust?” That was a hard question to answer, even though the Devil seemed to surge up in me to do it himself, so instead I just said I was sorry, so sorry, and tucked my knees up to my chest as though curling inside of a snail’s shell. I couldn’t think of anything else to do—I had never done this before, after all.

Tomie sighed, I suppose finally tired of the joke, and laid back in the sand to look up at the bottom of the pier, the moss and rot that scattered across the old boards there. Her hair was so pretty, so seemingly meticulous in how it fell over her shoulders and shined just so under the beach sun—I couldn’t help but frown to see her put it in the sand and ruin it. I was about to leave, apologize again, make my way back to the real world of the boardwalk, before she turned to look at me like she expected me to lie down too. How was I supposed to say no to that? She was so pretty, and had been so nice to me, even if she was a girl, and so scary because of it.

So we laid down together, Tomie and I, under the pier, no sound but for the water and birds and our breathing, if I listened closely enough. I watched her breathe, her chest as it rose up and down under her school uniform, and thought about how me and her have the same organs—how inside her, too, there is a heart, a stomach, two lungs. They must look the same as mine. 

“Yuuma,” Tomie said so suddenly it startled me, especially since I couldn’t remember telling her my name. She said it, and moved her tongue around in her mouth like she was getting a feel for the taste of it. “Yuu-ma. You’re so weird. You don’t like me.” There was no malice behind the statement—for now it was a statement, and not a question—nothing more than that same sort of stating, like she was making sense of it, letting it sink in. I didn’t know what to do other than apologize for it, like always, and though she didn’t stop me it made her frown.

You’re weird too, I told Tomie before I realized it, then felt embarrassed and apologized. It was true, though; she was so strange, stranger than girls were to me already. I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly. Something about the way she looked—I couldn’t help but think whether Chizumi would grow up to be a girl like her, or at least look like it. Something in their eyes was the same, even though a girl like that couldn’t possibly have been a monster like Chizumi. Above all, she didn’t seem daunted or changed any by that curse I carried, brain unmelted by that poison I held in my voice—if anything, each apology that escaped my throat put a look in her eyes that was sharper and more aware, like she _knew_ even though that was impossible. Right?

“I’m kind of happy you think that. Because I like that you don’t like me. Usually a thing like that would make me mad,” Tomie started, like I was someone she knew, someone she talked to about herself. “But you’re cute and sweet. Innocent. I would hate for a thing like that to happen to you. It would make me sad.” She said this as if I understood, even though I didn’t get it at all—but I thought about it afterwards, and figured that as scary as it is to like someone it must be even worse to be liked. I had been liked by girls before, and it was terrifying—I cowered at the sight of little notes stuffed into my locker, nauseous at the sight of that little pink heart sticker they must sell in bulk somewhere or other, that the thought of _doing_ something about it…! More often than not I ended up letting the meeting time pass tucked away in some corner of the library, apologizing afterwards, transferring schools further afterwards. It must be different for girls, I realized, less from talking to Tomie and more from just looking at her. Being a girl, and being liked by a boy, that must be the scariest thing imaginable.

I didn’t know Tomie, but for a second I felt as if I _got_ her, as if I understood some message her body had sent me. We could have been friends, maybe, if she were less forceful and I were less delicate. When she got up to leave, she kissed me on the lips once more, and I let her, because of how terrifying it must be, being Tomie. I never told her this, and never would have, but that kiss was my second kiss, and she had taken the first from me, too.

When I saw Tomie at the end of the day, she was holding hands with another boy, someone taller and broader-shouldered than myself—someone who was walking under the pier with her and not being dragged. Maybe I imagined it, but it seemed for a second like she turned to face me, smiling like a housecat with a bird...but she had to have been scared, too, just a little, underneath that. I watched them go, and hoped for a second that maybe he, too, would have had the same trick played on him as I did. Even though I knew it was unlikely. I learned something about womanhood that day, from Tomie, and I wished I hadn’t—it changed for me, no longer mysterious but fundamentally sad and distant from myself.

They found her body under the pier a week later, water-logged and chopped to bits. There was sand in her hair, the same sand that had been in my hair, that even then I was still washing off my body in the shower each night. I wondered if it would ever go away, but seeing that, I knew it wouldn’t. There would be grains of Tomie in me, on me, for a long while still. And while I was upset by the news, there was a moment of freezing cold calm in which I understood that this was what was always going to happen to a girl like that, a girl wanted, so terrifyingly, by all men. Except me, I thought with a shiver of what might have been guilt, except me.


End file.
